22 Race Equality Teaching © Trentham Books 2004 Introduction The discourse surrounding educational management and school leadership has recently undergone a significant change. We now hear the words ‘school improvement’, ‘race equality’, ‘standards agenda’ and ‘diversity’ used together in the context of educational policy development and school leadership training. This is a new development. If we examine the textbooks aimed at aspiring school leaders published in the 1980s and the 1990s in Britain, there are few references to equity issues. Typically, an edited collection of articles in a book on school management contained one chapter on gender, but if you go to the index and look for gender, race or social class these concepts are not explored to any significant extent elsewhere (see, for example, Bush et al., 1999) 1 . They do not form part of the analysis of most educational management specialists from this period. Many of these educational management books make no reference to race equality or ethnic diversity. This is curious, since at the time of publication substantial black and minority ethnic communities had been established for several decades and during the 1990s Britain was experiencing a wave of migration which required many schools to accommodate newly-arrived refugees and asylum seekers. The failure to address equalities as a key aspect of school leadership is of even greater concern when we consider the huge differentials in attainment between different groupings of students, by ethnicity, gender and social class. Since the publication of the Swann Report (DES, 1985) 2 no educational management specialist could be unaware of the failure of the education system to achieve equitable outcomes for all ethnic groups. From the mid-1990s the government and school management specialists had clear statistical evidence, based on LEA and other studies, of differentials in achievement by ethnicity and other factors (Gillborn and Gipps, 1996; 3 Gillborn and Mirza, 2000) 4 . The first official report to provide a national picture of attainment by ethnicity at the end of primary schooling (Key Stage 2) was quietly published without a press release (Tikly et al., 2002) 5 . This same report marked the only step which the DFES has made towards meeting a government promise to evaluate impact of the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant. Throughout the 1990s the reluctance of school management experts to consider ethnicity as a factor in student attainment and therefore as a critical concern of school leaders was matched by a model of school leadership which remained predominantly white and male. Studies which examined the leadership experiences of women (Adler et al., 1993; 6 Ozga, 1993 7 ) and both women and men from minority ethnic communities (Osler, 1997) are not yet widely drawn on by trainers and researchers to develop more inclusive models of school leadership. The predominant message to aspiring headteachers who are female and/or from black communities is that their experiences are marginal. I recall a former editor of Educational Management and Administration expressing his concern that the journal had little success in attracting articles which addressed diversity or race equality. The majority of contributors did not see these issues as central to their concerns. I am sure that it was possible for an aspiring headteacher working in a culturally diverse city, such as Birmingham or Leicester, to register for a Masters’ degree in educational management in the 1990s and to complete the course successfully without having to examine race equality issues. I wish to consider some of the reasons for the recent changes in school leadership discourse and to explore whether these developments reflect a changing professional culture among school leadership trainers and researchers. In particular, I wish to consider the extent to which equality and diversity issues have been mainstreamed. I will draw on the voices of headteachers and others who hold leadership positions within the English education service. What can we learn from those school leaders who have made an explicit commitment to race equality? How can we build upon their work to inform policy in this area? What research Changing leadership and schools: diversity, equality and citizenship Audrey Osler